a journey to the artists, origins and work of American craft
Julie Chen, Personal Paradigms. Photograph by Siblia Savage.
People have long found ways
to record and communicate
information, from writing on
stone, wood, and clay tablets
in the earliest times, to using papyrus and parchment for scrolls. Scrolls
evolved into early forms of books. Rare
and valued for their exquisite beauty,
books were written and constructed by
hand with handmade materials, and
each book was a unique creation
or a copy of an existing book. You can’t judge a book by its binding.
Multiple copies were handmade
“”
—American Speech journal
prior to the invention of the
printing press in about 1440, which
has evolved into the production methods we know today.
Despite available technology that
allows for multiple copies and wide
distribution, some artists still craft
books by hand. Most handmade books
fall within a continuum where, at one
end you find more traditional forms
and, at the other end, are structures
that push the boundaries of what it
means to be a book.
Tom Killion crafts traditional
books. Inspired by Japanese artists
Hokusai and Hiroshige, and using
Japanese carving tools, he creates
wood and linoleum block prints
of landscape images he has first
sketched on site. Many of his prints
reveal a deep connection with his
native northern California scenery.
Killion was in his late teens when
he first hand-printed illustrations for
books, and only 21 when he merged
text and image to complete
Twenty-Eight Views of Mount Tamalpais,
celebrating the mountain that visually dominated his early life in Mill
Valley, California. Since then, the artist has completed many such projects,
including Walls: A Journey Across
Three Continents—a blend of text
from his travel journals, carefully
selected handmade paper, and prints
of European and African scenes.
Julie Chen playfully pushes the
conceptual limits of books. Always
mindful of the reader who will inter-
act with her structures, she selects
papers to delight the eye and appeal
to the touch, while creating forms
that function as “vessels” for text,
images, ideas, and meaning. The ele-
ment of surprise is integral to her
books—what might be antici-
pated as a “page” emerges as
three-dimensional sculptural
space. In one work, Bon Bon
Mots, a superbly crafted “candy” box
opens to reveal five small sculptural
forms; each is a book in its own right,
albeit a book that seems much more
like a toy than a book. Despite the
nontraditional forms it often occu-
pies, the text in Chen’s creations
is letterpress printed. Even as she
explores unconventional structures,
Julie Chen maintains the longstand-
ing bookmaking tradition in which
exquisite craftsmanship is the norm.
